Internet Society Pushes for More IPv6

IPv4 addresses are all gone now, right? So why haven't more orgs moved to IPv6? Internet Society now has a plan to help make that happen.

The world needs to move to IPv6. That's the message coming out of the Internet Society as the effects of IPv4 address space exhaustion begin to set in.

The free pool of IPv4 addresses were officially exhausted in February of 2011. Yet, despite that fact, the transition to IPv6, which provides a 128-bit addressing scheme and support for 340 trillion, trillion, trillion (34 x 10 to the 38th power) addresses, migration to IPv6 has been slow.

The Internet Society has now launched a series of new efforts to help move the Internet to IPv6. One of the new efforts is called Deploy 360 and includes tools and resources to help organizations big and small adopt IPv6. The other effort is an official launch date for IPv6 as a permanent fixture for major websites.

Richard Jimmerson, director, Deployment & Operationalization Hub (DO Hub) at the Internet Society, told InternetNews.com that Deploy 360 is all about moving from talking about the Why and moving to talking about the How.

Deploy 360 is not about recreating existing IPv6 deployment resources. Rather, it's about featuring and collecting the best information possible about how to deploy IPv6. Jimmerson noted that the Deploy 360 resource is need to help system administrators have the confidence to move forward with IPv6 and to show that there are many organizations making the move.

Moving forward, the plan is to expand the Deploy 360 resource in Q2 from being just about information to also featuring IPv6 training organizations and consultants.

The second quarter of 2012 will also be when the the Society is leading another global effort for IPv6. World IPv6 Launch Day is scheduled for June 6, 2012. That date is intended to be a milestone date on which multiple vendors and websites will permanently enable IPv6 for their main domains. Among the companies set to participate in the event are Google, Facebook, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cisco and D-Link.

"For Google, World IPv6 Launch means that virtually all our services, including Search, Gmail, YouTube and many more, will be available to the world over IPv6 permanently," Erik Kline, IPv6 software engineer at Google, wrote in a blog post. "Previously, only participants in the Google over IPv6 program (several hundred thousand users, including almost all Google employees ) have been using it every day. Now we’re including everyone."